MARITIME MOTORSPORTS: Williamswood’s Thibodeau holds on for emotional title win

Five wins for Scott Thibodeau in 2017 was a career high for wins in a single season for the Williamswood driver. (Mike McCarthy)

One of the most exciting season-long two way battles for a championship in all of Atlantic Canada came at Scotia Speedworld in the Toursec Lightning division.

Two drivers, who have battled in the Four Cylinder division for a number of years with over a dozen feature wins to each of their credit, battled for their first track championships. While the two have different racing backgrounds and carved two different paths to the final race of 2017, they both found themselves lining up going for the year long title.

In short, Williamswood’s Scott Thibodeau topped “Rational” Richard Drake of Halifax by the slimmest of margins — one position in a feature event.

That might seem big to a general race fan that one position in a race was the difference in winning a championship, but when the championship encompassed fourteen races throughout the Summer, one position or two points is a small margin in the grand scheme of a year.

The pair had battled with Deven Smith for the last two years. In 2015 and 2016, it was common to see all three cars on the podium virtually every race. With Smith scaling back to a part-time effort this year and focusing on a run at the Sportsman division in 2018, it left the pressure on Thibodeau and Drake to win a championship.

Thibodeau raced to the front and quickly established himself as the driver to beat. He won on Opening Day on May and racked up two more feature wins before the halfway point of the year in July. In addition to the three wins, he had two third place finishes and two fifth place finishes. In a field that averaged 15 cars per week, racing to seven top five finishes early in the season was an impressive feat, but not terribly surprising to those within the division.

It is common to see Richard Drake (141) and Scott Thibodeau (169) on track together over the past four seasons. Thibodeau edged Drake by two points in the championship standings in 2017. (MIKE MCCARTHY)

Thibodeau and his No. 169 team built a lead over Drake in the standings. While Drake was quietly going about his business, he was racking up seven top six feature finishes with no victories.

Drake would go on a streak in the second half, racking up a whopping four feature wins in the final six races entering the finale. The two feature wins that he did not put in his back pocket belonged to Thibodeau, including the penultimate round.

“We were lights out the first half but we had a couple “off weeks” in the middle of the season which caused our point lead to disappear,” said Thibodeau of his year. “We turned the pressure up when it counted in the three races leading into the finale.”

Thibodeau had built up a seven point advantage heading into the final race of the year over Drake. Drake would pick up three points in the qualifier on Thibodeau, leaving the margin to four points, or the equivalent of two feature positions, in the final 25-lap feature of the year.

Drake and Thibodeau wasted little time getting to the front of the field with Drake getting the early breaks to get ahead of Thibodeau. Thibodeau had some minor cosmetic damage from a jam up on the second lap but still managed to run to second place in the opening laps.

Then, as Drake led Thibodeau, the point leader’s car began getting smaller and smaller in the rear view of Drake’s No 141 Neon. Thibodeau’s car began to miss and as the laps clicked away, Rookie of the Year Travis Keefe was reeling Thibodeau in.

If it was a 30-lap feature, Keefe may have been able to get by the ailing car but Thibodeau had just enough to hold on for his first championship and a two point margin. A tiebreaker would have meant Drake would have edged out Thibodeau, so the position at the end was key to keeping him in title contention.

“When we peeled everything back after the final race, we found one cylinder with zero compression,” said Thibodeau of the miss that would have caused the loss of power throughout the last half of final race.

Thibodeau drove the second half of the season in honor of his Father and Crew Chief Bob Thibodeau. Bob, who had been instrumental in Scott’s stock car racing career from the start almost a decade ago, passed away suddenly in August. The pair had two goals entering 2017, to win both ends of the Toursec Twin 50s and the championship. Those goals were both achieved.

If you add in the Atlantic Championships win the team achieved in October 2016 at the CENTRE For Speed in Shediac, New Brunswick, the team has amassed quite an impressive resume in eleven months.

As for 2018, Thibodeau is unsure what his stock car racing plans are. One thing is for sure, he has established himself as one of the top drivers in a Four Cylinder car throughout the region that now has an exclamation point with a season long championship at Scotia Speedworld.